We (my physicist/farmer husband & me & the dogs & the cats) moved from sprawling Houston, TX to a small, but useless farm in Florida. Then the donkey moved in. He was lonely, so the goats came. & then some horses, some more dogs, chickens, cockatiels, more cats, new horses. You get the picture.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

8:56 (4 to 9, get it?)

It began with the red&white March 2011 Block Lotto block. I am not what you would call a red fan; I was hard-pressed to find any red fabric at all for a much small challenge way-back-when but this time I decided to just bite the bullet & buy more fabric. You know, to help the economy.

& since I was buying fabric, & I happened to have a 50% off any single purchase one-day only coupon in my purse & I was right there on that day... I also bought a little (by my standards) cutting board with a lazy susan idea. The short version is, if it were not for this purchase,many many 8:56 blocks would never have been cut; because of this board, I now have even more quilts in mind.

Almost everyone on the block lotto blog said how fast this block went. That was not quite my experience, exactly.

I will say making the first step 4-patches was indeed a piece of cake. Almost every selvage-to-selvage strip worked up into 8 pairs & then four 4-patches, so that pile did grow quickly, quantity-wise.

The next few steps really dragged though. One at a time each 4-patch was cut one inch from that center seam four times. Then the borders between the two were flipped, etcetera etcetera etcetera. I like to do this kind of thing in bulk, but having one board from which to work & a desire to keep everything in order as best I could, it was one block at a time from here on out.

It probably did not help I was listening to the Fellowship of the Ring at the time. All those elven legends, all that cut turn cut turn cut turn....stitch press stitch press... Still so far I am happy with the results & I am 99.9% sure the worst is behind me (never say never).

1 comment:

I cut all my 4-patches one at a time and then stacked them all up on a 12" ruler to take to the sewing machine... I really liked making this block! Amazing how it's sort of the opposit of a disappearing 9-patch, and looks so much more interesting.